Search Results for: soldier defect

Before I go any further, let me clear the air about something. Back on the First of July, after reading this New York Times story, among others, I wrote that “if these new reports are correct, I see little to criticize in President Obama’s current Syria policy.” Unfortunately, most evidence now suggests that those reports were wrong, even allowing for what ordinary citizens don’t know about CIA activities in Syria. Whatever support we’re giving the Free Syrian Army is modest...

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HAS WON THE NOMINATION, as we knew she would all along. I wish Ms. Park the best of luck. This isn’t because I’m an especially great fan; Ms. Park has shown an authoritarian mindset and a lack of vision about achieving unification, as opposed to maintaining deterrence. It’s because Ms. Park is smart, tough, and would be an effective executive if — if — she can resist the temptation to overreach, and because the alternatives are so...

ON RARE OCCASIONS, I CONSIDER KCNA to be authoritative, and this is one of those occasions: In a dispatch headlined “To Expect ‘Change’ From DPRK Is Foolish Ambition,” the North’s Korea Central News Agency in stark terms confronted and put down speculation and comments by outsiders that its authoritarian government might change its ways. [….] Then the spokesman said that South Korea’s government – which it blames for many of its problems  –  “let experts in the north affairs and...

There are a few things I can’t let pass without comment this weekend. The defection of a squad of armed North Korean soldiers — if true, as the compulsory caveat goes — could open a new chapter in the Kim Dynasty’s erosive dialectic. This sort of defection can’t happen on a mass scale despite the forceful suppression of the two fascist regimes that border the Yalu, but it does suggest that when North Korea eventually devolves into something like what...

The Grand National Party officially enters election mode with the old “Northern Wind” play: South Korea’s ruling party chief crossed the border into North Korea to tour a joint inter-Korean industrial complex on Friday, saying it is “a politician’s obligation” to break the deadlock in inter-Korean relations. [….] The one-day trip by Rep. Hong Joon-pyo, chairman of the ruling Grand National Party, comes after he called for Seoul to exercise flexibility on its policy toward Pyongyang to try to improve...

The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Ramstad and the Joongang Ilbo notice that North Korea’s plea for the starving children needs some better message control: On a radio broadcast on July 4, a North Korean official said, “Our farming laborers will, with rifle in one hand and a scythe in the other like in the war for independence, make a decisive change this in year in agricultural production and serve to send more rice for our military, which will strike open...

More from Bradley Martin — a few months old, but worth reading: Appeasement doesn’t work with North Korea. In the short-term it may yield diplomatic agreements, but in the longterm it only makes the country’s political and military leaders increasingly arrogant, determined to be even more provocative so that they can extort still-larger concessions from their adversaries abroad and portray themselves at home as giant-killers. The above statement, in rough outline, would now draw agreement from the majority of serious...

Melanie Kirkpatrick, writing with Jack David in the Wall Street Journal, quotes senior North Korean defector Kim Duk-hong on Kim Jong Il’s nuclear policy: In the early 1990s, Mr. Kim told us, Kim Il Sung posed a question at a meeting of the military committee of the Workers Party. Kim Il Sung’s question, and Kim Jong Il’s reply, were disclosed in a memorandum that was distributed to every member of the Central Committee, including Kim Duk-hong. Colleagues who were present...